Tuesday, May 26, 2009

Science of the Movies is a new series on The Science Channel that takes an in-depth look at how special effects in the movies are created. From the episode guide, it doesn't look like there will be much about actual science. There will be lots of nifty technology, though. It looks like it should be fun to watch.

Science of the Movies is on Tuesday nights at 9pm on the Science Channel. (If you, like me, have never even heard of The Science Channel, check the high numbers of the cable channels you receive. On my TV it's channel 191.)

Monday, May 25, 2009

It is an important and popular fact thatthings are not alwasys what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, many had always asumed that he was mor intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - while all the dolphins had ever done was much about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.~ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (1979)

Friday, May 22, 2009

The first engagement in the Little War took place at Fifteenth and K street in front of the Sheraton Bar and Grill in the heart of Washington. For over a month young people had been pouring into the city, massing for a huge demonstration to protest the Thirty-ninth Amendment to the Constitution. Like other prohibitions before it, this Compulsory Birth Control Act was impossible to enforce, and youth had taken the stand that it was a direct infringement of their rights. Bitter resentment was directed against the two arms of Governmental enforcement, the National Council of Eugenics and the Federal Birth Study commission. Washington had no business regulating the number of children a citizen could have. Bitterness turned to talk of rebellion.~ Logan's Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson

In 1967, the year Logan's Run was published, tens of thousands of young Americans descended on San Francisco for the fabled "Summer of Love", and it must have seemed like teenagers really would take over the country. It was the perfect backdrop for William Nolan and George Clayton John's future dystopian youth culture, where all upstanding citizens went voluntarily to their death by their 21st birthday.

The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength. By the early 1970s over 75 per cent of the people living on earth were under twenty-one years of age. The population continued to climb - and with it the youth percentage.In the 1980s the figure was 79.7 per cent.In the 1990s, 82.4 per cent.In the year 2000 - critical mass

So while the novel is still an entertaining read, the backstory hasn't aged very well. It makes me wonder how the on-again off-againon-againoff-againon-again movie remake of Logan's Run will approach the material. Director Joseph Kosinsky claimed back in 2007 that the story would "hew closer to the book than the 1976 movie." That wouldn't be too difficult, since the movie didn't follow the novel much beyond its basic premise. In particular, I think the original movie's shift of the age of death to 30 from 21 significantly changed the tone of the story - for some reason I find 16-year-old enforcers more disturbing than 26-year-olds in the same role.

While the new movie will supposedly be released in 2010, there probably won't be any official word until later this year as to whether it's actually being made. Until then, enjoy this trailer for the original film, that really captures it's cheesy 70s goodness:

* Life expectancy at birth was 47.3 in 1900, 70.8 in 1980 and 77.8 in 2005 (See Table 26)

Image: Sexy-but-significantly-older-than-21-year-old Michael York in the original Logan's Run movie (via the excellent City of Domes web site).

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

"In South America there are, if my memory serves me—you will check the observation, Professor Summerlee—some thirty-six species of monkeys, but the anthropoid ape is unknown. It is clear, however, that he exists in this country, and that he is not the hairy, gorilla-like variety, which is never seen out of Africa or the East." (I was inclined to interpolate, as I looked at him, that I had seen his first cousin in Kensington.) "This is a whiskered and colorless type, the latter characteristic pointing to the fact that he spends his days in arboreal seclusion. The question which we have to face is whether he approaches more closely to the ape or the man. In the latter case, he may well approximate to what the vulgar have called the 'missing link.' The solution of this problem is our immediate duty."~ The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle (1912)

If you've watched the news - or used Google today - you can't have missed all of the publicity about the well-preserved 47-million-year old primate fossil nicknamed "Ida" (or more technically, Darwinius masillae). She is both beautiful and important scientifically. As the authors summed up in their paper describing the find:

Darwinius masillae represents the most complete fossil primate ever found, including both skeleton, soft body outline and contents of the digestive tract. Study of all these features allows a fairly complete reconstruction of life history, locomotion, and diet. Any future study of Eocene-Oligocene primates should benefit from information preserved in the Darwinius holotype.

Ida is a prosimian in the family Adapidae - similar to present-day lemurs - and the type of primate that may have been ancestor to Anthropoidea - including present-day monkeys, apes and humans. The scientists studying Ida were careful not to claim that she was necessarily of a species ancestral to humans.

Note that Darwinius masillae, and adapoids contemporary with early tarsioids, could represent a stem group from which later anthropoid primates evolved, but we are not advocating this here, nor do we consider either Darwinius or adapoids to be anthropoids.

"When our results are published, it will be just like an asteroid hitting the Earth."

Presumably without all the death and destruction.

To add to the hype, many of the articles in the mainstream media have touted the find as "the missing link" - a non-sensical term, since every new fossil species is a new link in the evolutionary record. As the quote from The Lost World suggests, the phrase had already fallen out of favor by the beginning of the 20th century, so it's simply bad science journalism for news reports to be using it now.

And it's not just the media hype that's at issue. At Laelaps Brian Switek has raised some questions as to the quality of the paper's analysis of the fossil. I'm not well-versed enough in paleontology to give my opinion on that. However, I do find it troubling that the History channel's PR department and the scientists' own self-promotion are providing a false picture of the significance of this fossil find. I suspect that the over-the-top promotion will be a turnoff to many people who already assume that scientists routinely exaggerate their findings.

And I doubt Stephen Baxter will feel the need to add a chapter to Evolution.

Actually the Immortals appear very little in the book, primarily at the beginning, and play a relatively small role. As you read on, you find that the book is really all about issues relating to medicine and its role in society, and especially about its differential availability to those at various economic levels. Indeed, the hunt for the Immortals is really a metaphor of sorts for the privileged status of the ultra-rich who have access to the best, most cutting-edge medical care.

PFH: The genetic technology that hopefully will cure Spina Bifida one day could also be used to create viruses that could just wipe us out completely.

But does that mean you should stop researching genetics? We laugh, we hold politicians and the political process in contempt, but the societal structure of international law and order does actually hold that off.

Movies

What do you call a movie that is set in the very near future, explores biotechnology that is almost-but-not-quite-yet possible, but doesn't otherwise use any science fictional tropes? What if it's a bit too speculative to be considered true realism, but too realistic to quite be SF? I don't really have an answer (speculative bioethics?), but there are a couple of recent films that seem to fit the bill: My Sister's Keeper (watch the trailer at Genetics and Health) and The Baby Formula.

Warner and Goldsman will transplant the action to the United States and ramp up the spectacle.

Because battling dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures clearly just isn't actiony enough. BBC-America will show season 3 of Primeval beginning tonight, and SciFi is currently airing season 1 on Friday nights.

And as Sawyer notes in his blog: the talk contains "major spoilers for both books", so you've been warned. If you are interested in learning more about the novels check out Sawyer's web pages for Mindscan and Wake that include sample chapters and reviews.

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Genetically engineered microorganisms, or GEMs, had been on the scene only about half a century when the first hundred arrived on Mars. But half a century in modern science is a long time. Plasmid conjugates had become very sophisticated tools in those years. The array of restriction enzymes for cutting, and ligase enzymes for pasting, was big and versatile; the ability to line out long DNA strings precisely was there; the accumulated knowledge of genomes was immense, and growing exponentially; and used all together, this new biotechnology was allowing all kinds of trait mobilization, promotion, replication, triggered suicide (to stop excess success), and so forth. It was possible to find the DNA sequences from an organism that carried the desired characteristic, and then synthesize these DNA messages and cut and paste them into plasmid rings; after that cells were washed and suspended in a glycerol with the new plasmids, and the glycerol was suspended between two electrodes and given a short sharp shock of about 2,000 volts, and the plasmids in the glycerol shot into the cells, and voila! There, zapped to life like Frankenstein's monster, was a new organism. With new abilities.

Robinson's description of engineering DNA sequences and introducing them into cells using electricity almost reads like an excerpt from a biology textbook. It was (and pretty much still is) the standard molecular biology technology of the present day. In Red Mars genetic engineering is used to modify microorganisms, fungi, algae and plants to aid in the terraforming of Mars. It's pretty mundane science - and that's the way he meant it to be.

Why couldn't the geneticists of the Mars trilogy alter the human genome to allow humans to breathe and live in a less-altered environment?

His answer made it clear that he was sticking to science that would be achievable in the near-future of Red Mars, which is set in 2026:

The technology described in the Mars trilogy is not super-science, and the genetic engineering as outlined in some detail in Red Mars is not that far beyond what they are doing now. So you can make some changes, but you can't just drastically remake creatures and plants. The existing Martian environment has an atmosphere of 10 millibars of mostly CO2, and no genetic engineering is going to make us able to breathe that, nor keep all our capillaries from exploding (die by hickey as Damon Knight put it), etc.

And so, if you're altering the environment a little, you might as well go for a little more and not get into the realm of super-science, or the postulated realm of radically altered bodies. I like our bodies the way they are.

I like the plausibility of that, as if colonizing Mars is within our current scientific means.

As part of the media blitz for the new Star Trek movie, Newsweek published "Confessions of a 'Star Trek' Writer" by writer and physicist Leonard Mlodinow. He provides a behind-the-scenes glimpse at what it was like writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation - including an explanation as to why the science could be so very bad on the show:

One of the first staff meetings I attended concerned a script that had come in from the outside, and was considered insufficiently exciting. The consensus was that it needed a good injection of crew jeopardy so that it wouldn't drag. That could be difficult because it had to make sense in the context of the existing story, and, to keep from sending the episode over budget, it had to be cheap to film even though special effects are generally costly. I had what I thought was an idea that fit those constraints and, even more exciting (for me), an idea rooted in real astrophysics. I took about half a minute to pitch it, and for the first time everyone's attention was focused on me, the new guy. When it was over I turned to my boss, a producer who was a gruff middle-aged former NYPD homicide detective. He stared at me for a moment, his face totally unreadable. Then he said, with great force, "Shut up, you f––king egghead!"

That producer and I eventually became close enough that when he later sensed he was going to be axed, he gave me advice on what to do in the unlikely event that I survived. (No. 1: never mention the "old days." No. 2: when you do see the inevitable pink slip coming, turn down the heat on your swimming pool.) One thing I learned from him is that I had had it backward. The fun in "Star Trek" didn't come from copying science, but from having science copy it. My job wasn't to put real science into "Star Trek," but to imagine new ideas that hadn't yet been thought of.

Trek is about gadgets and engineering, not science.

Mlodinow then goes on to talk about the similarity of Star Trek's "free thinking" point of view to the burst of American post-WWII technological innovation, which makes sense to me. The future depicted on Trek is one in which technology - particularly Americaninventions - has made the world a much better place. Well, except for human genetic engineering, which resulted in a war that killed 30 million people. No wonder we don't hear much about their innovations in biotechnology.

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

National Geographic Channel has a new special - In the Womb: Extreme Animals - which uses "4-D ultrasound images" to follow the gestation of four different critters: red kangaroo, lemon shark, emperor penguin and parasitic wasps. Despite the title of the program, there isn't really much in-womb development: the kangaroo develops in its mother's pouch, the lemon shark initially lives off a yolk sac then becomes attached to it's mother via a placenta, the penguin embryo develops inside an egg kept warm on its father's feet.

And then there are the parasitic wasps. Wasp eggs are injected into a caterpillar, which provides a cozy protected space for the embryos to develop. Once they have matured, the larvae paralyze their host and bite their way out. Sound familiar? They were the inspiration for the "birth" scene in the 1979 movie Alien (The Director's Cut), which used John Hurt in the caterpillar role. *shudder*

Here's their video of the parasitic wasp larvae emerging from a caterpillar:

Le Guin's early years help explain her abiding concern: Is there such a thing as a stable human nature? She grew up in Berkeley, the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, a founder of modern anthropology, and Theodora Kroeber, author of "Ishi in Two Worlds," about an American Indian who had outlived his tribe. Her childhood, which included summers at a family ranch in Napa, was full of reading, storytelling and visits from European intellectuals and Native Americans.

"I was privileged," she says, "to know the kind of people that most American kids, most bourgeois white kids, don't." She was raised "as irreligious as a jack rabbit."Eric Rabkin, who teaches at the University of Michigan, sees her work as profoundly shaped by her exposure to alien cultures as well as her father's ambition to find as specifically as he could the time and place from which Western civilization had sprung. "There's a kind of romance to that view," Rabkin says. "That once upon a time, the worst antagonisms were merely inter-familial -- that basically we're all alike and trustworthy. And I believe she grew up in a family in which that was considered not a fantasy but a scientific fact."

[Note that I added the links to the excerpt above.]

While most of Le Guin's science fiction would be considered of the "soft" rather than "hard" variety, that doesn't mean that there is no science - or technology - in her work, as she aptly points out in this rant:

How can genuine science fiction of any kind lack technological content? Even if its principal interest isn't in engineering or how machines work — if like most of mine, it's more interested in how minds, societies, and cultures work — still, how can anybody make a story about a future or an alien culture without describing, implicitly or explicitly, its technology?

Nobody can. I can't imagine why they'd want to.

Its technology is how a society copes with physical reality: how people get and keep and cook food, how they clothe themselves, what their power sources are (animal? human? water? wind? electricity? other?) what they build with and what they build, their medicine - and so on and on. Perhaps very ethereal people aren't interested in these mundane, bodily matters, but I'm fascinated by them, and I think most of my readers are too.

Read the whole essay. I can't help but think that her ability to clearly explain how silly it is to limit "technology" to modern shiny gadgets has something to do with the anthropology in Le Guin's background. It's excellent food for thought.

Wednesday, May 06, 2009

In anticipation of the release of the new Star Trek movie, neuroscientist Athena Andreadis has posted an epilogue to her 1998 book, To Seek Out New Life: The Biology of Star Trek. Despite the show's tendency toward pseudoscientific technobabble, she notes that some of the biology depicted - like human genetic engineering and organ regeneration - are not only possible, but may be feasible in the near future. And she makes what I think is a very good point: the real value of Star Trek in promoting science lies in its positive depiction of science and technology, rather than the actual scientific details in each episode.

On the other hand, technobabble and all, Star Trek fulfills a very imporant role. It shows and endorses the value of science and technology — the only popular TV series to do so, at a time when science has lost both appeal and prestige. With the increasing depth of each scientific field, and the burgeoning of specialized jargon, it is distressingly easy for us scientists to isolate ourselves within our small niches and forget to share the wonders of our discoveries with our fellow passengers on the starship Earth. Despite its errors, Star Trek’s greatest contribution is that it has made us dream of possibilities, and that it has made that dream accessible to people both inside and outside science.

Monday, May 04, 2009

I almost missed it, but today, May the Fourth, is Star Wars day (get it?). There isn't much real science in the movies, but what I find pretty cool is that the novels, games and official magazines and guides have worked out the a biology of the aliens, ecology of the planets and other official minutiae of the Star Wars universe in detail.

Jimmy's father worked for OrganInc Farms. He was a genographer, one of the best in the field. He'd done some of the key studies on mapping the proteonome when he was still a post-grad, and then he'd helped engineer the Methuselah Mouse as part of Operation Immortality. After that, at OrganInc Farms, he'd been one of the foremost architects of the pigoon project, along with a team of transplant experts and the microbiologists who were splicing against infections. Pigoon was only a nickname: the official name was sus multiorganifer. But pigoon was what everyone said. [... snip ...]The goal of the pigoon project was to grown an assortment of foolproof human-tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host - organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fend off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there were more strains every year. A rapid-maturity gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were perfecting a pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time.~ Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood (2003)

Several of my close relatives are scientists, and the main topic at the annual family Christmas dinner is likely to be intestinal parasites or sex hormones in mice, or, when that makes the non-scientists too queasy, the nature of the Universe. My recreational reading — books I read for fun, magazines I read in airplanes — is likely to be pop science of the Stephen Jay Gould or Scientific American type, partly so I'll be able to keep up with the family dialogue and maybe throw a curve or two. (‘Supercavitation?’) So I'd been clipping small items from the back pages of newspapers for years, and noting with alarm that trends derided ten years ago as paranoid fantasies had become possibilities, then actualities. The rules of biology are as inexorable as those of physics: run out of food and water and you die. No animal can exhaust its resource base and hope to survive. Human civilizations are subject to the same law.

The general interest in science, the casual reading of science magazines, the following of scientific trends - all are pretty typical behaviors for science fiction writers. That's why I find it disappointing that Atwood claims that what she has written totally isn't science fiction.

Like The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake is a speculative fiction, not a science fiction proper. It contains no intergalactic space travel, no teleportation, no Martians. As with The Handmaid's Tale, it invents nothing we haven't already invented or started to invent. Every novel begins with a what if, and then sets forth its axioms. The what if of Oryx and Crake is simply, What if we continue down the road we're already on?How slippery is the slope? What are our saving graces? Who's got the will to stop us?

Her nightmarish, futuristic scenarios have caused some of her books to be tagged as science fiction, though she thinks that genre doesn’t quite fit — “since there aren’t aliens and spaceships and the other usual things,” she said.

It's not as if Atwood isn't familiar with the genre, or willing to acknowledge that some SF works are "brilliant", it's that she wants to draw a line between science fiction, which is "gizmo-riddled and theory-based space travel, time travel, or cybertravel to other worlds, with aliens frequent" and speculative fiction, which is about "human society and its possible future forms, which are either much better than what we have now, or much worse". The problem is that her definition excludes many award-winning works that are considered by most to be science fiction, including Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio and Nancy Kress's Beggars in Spain (to name two stories that are bioscience based), as well as the entire ribofunk subgenre.

Science fiction readers consider novels like hers that look at the future of humanity to be part of the genre, so I think she's pretty much stuck with the label. I just wish she could embrace the genre that she seems so reluctant to be a part of.

About Biology in Science Fiction

Science fiction isn't just about rocket ships and ray guns. Many science fiction books, movies and TV shows are based on the biological sciences. This blog discusses cloning, genetic engineering, mutant monsters, longevity treatments and all the other biology behind the fiction.

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